Back injuries are an expensive, frustrating, and widespread problem. People who suffer from back problems include those with bad posture, trauma victims, recovering spinal surgery patients, elderly persons undergoing osteoporosis and the posture changes attendant with aging, and expectant mothers. Such people seek held from a variety of medical professionals, including clinical physicians and physical therapists. In response, these medical professionals diagnose back problems, recommend exercise regimens and other treatments, and monitor each patient's progress toward recovery or proper spinal posture and flexibility.
In order to properly diagnose, treat, and monitor spinal problems, however, medical professionals need accurate information. Two types of information are desirable. First, professionals need accurate measurements which capture the spinal shape or contour. Second, they need accurate measurements of the flexibility of a chosen spinal segment. Both the contour and the flexibility measurements must be obtained in a reliable and repeatable manner from direct examination of the patient.
When a healthy human spine is viewed laterally, it presents several curves corresponding to different regions of the spinal column. These are called the cervical, dorsal, lumbar, and pelvic curves. Accurate measurements of these curves assists medical professionals in diagnosing and monitoring back problems. The relative size of two curves, for instance, may be an important diagnostic indicator. Similarly, reliable information about the changes in a given curve over time can be an important tool in monitoring the patient's progress. It may also be useful to measure the spine with the patient in various positions, including standing straight, sitting, lying, bending forward to flex the spine, and bending backward to extend the spine.
Several attempts have been made to reliably quantify spinal contours and flexibility. For instance, images of the spine may be reliably captured using conventional X-ray equipment, magnetic nuclear resonance devices, and known tomography tools. However, such devices are often prohibitively large and expensive for an individual medical professional to obtain. Each use of such a device may also be quite costly. Moreover, these devices are rarely portable, and they require additional specialists as operators.
Another drawback of tomography tools and similar devices is that they do not address the issue of how to reduce the vast amount of data produced to a form usable by medical professionals and understandable by their patients. Because treatment of back problems often involves exercise regimens and posture modification which can only be carried out by the patient, it is particularly important that measurements be presented in a form that can be explained to patients and used to motivate them. The fact that interpretation of tomographic images typically requires specialized professional training is thus a severe disadvantage.
Goniometers and inclinometers have also been tested as tools for measuring the spine. Although such devices are portable and relatively easy to use, the information they provide is insufficient. Even if utilized in pairs, these devices can only measure angles. As noted above, however, professionals need accurate measurements of spinal curves. Angular measurements are appropriate when examining joints such as the knee or the elbow, but they have very limited utility in connection with the spine.
Lacking adequate tools, medical professionals often rely on simple visual inspection of their patients' spines. This approach has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive, portable, versatile, and easy to use. Unfortunately, however, "eyeballing" the spinal curves produces unreliable results. The measurements are subjective, not quantitative and reproducible. The absence of repeatable quantitative spine measurements is particularly troublesome when attempts are made to monitor the patient's progress over time. Moreover, such visual inspections produce no visible record that can be presented to the patient for purposes of explanation and motivation.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide a gauge for reliably measuring spinal contours.
It would also be an advancement to provide such a gauge which can be operated by a medical professional with little additional training.
It would be a further advancement in the art to provide a spinal contour gauge which is inexpensive to operate, portable, and relatively small.
It would be an additional advancement in the art to provide methods for using such a gauge to produce spinal measurements in a form that is useful to medical professionals and understandable by their patients.
It would also be an advancement to provide methods for using such a gauge to reliably quantify the flexibility of selected spinal segments.
Such a spinal contour gauge and related methods are disclosed and claimed herein.